The psychic technology crucial to justifying the expansion of empire was the invention of the diametrically opposed concepts of “society” and “nature.” Humans who were capable of allegedly rational thought—usually white, Christian, landowning men—comprised “society.” The rest of the planet—non-Europeans, women, animals, rivers, and plants—were

Metchnikoff’s seminal research identified what we now call the innate immune system, which reacts immediately to ancient molecular patterns that signal damage or infection. Inflammation and phagocytes are part of this first-responder branch. There are several immune cells that engulf things, but the hungry phagocyte that captured Metchnikoff’s

The fifteenth century saw the simultaneous inauguration of European empire and the ascendency of a scientific worldview that objectified and diminished life and the natural world.

A damaged cell will release damage-associated molecular patterns triggering inflammation.112 For example, an abundance of uric acid, a highly inflammatory molecule produced by cellular damage, creates the clinical syndrome known as gout.

The “self” of immunology is more porous and fluid than the one in liberal political science, able to be shaped by social, economic, and political injustices. Matzinger herself wrote, “The immune system does not care about self and non-self[;] its primary driving force is the need to detect and protect against danger.”107 In other words, it is “more

The fall of beaver populations also changed the way rivers ran across the North American continent. The biodiversity that thrived because of the beaver’s hydrological engineering plummeted. With their dams, beavers create successional habitats that provide slow-moving water sanctuaries for plants, insects, and other animals, such as salmon. As

The adaptive immune system develops specific biological responses and maintains recognition of prior exposures over an individual’s lifetime, through antibodies and memory cells.

While fluoridation may have emerged in the 1940s as a low-cost public health intervention to manage working-class dental problems, today it is a billion-dollar subsidy for the fertilizer industry, in which hydrofluorosilicic acid is a by-product. This industrial waste has found a lucrative afterlife in water supplies around the world.

Put a different way, an accurate diagnosis of the workers in Alicia’s community would implicate the systems of injustice created during the colonial era, beginning with the exploitation and enslavement of the Takelma people and ending with a system of racial capitalism that treats migrant workers as disposable.25 A story that fails to incorporate